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Loading ...Most social workers believe poverty is not significantly, or at all, considered in social care assessments and plans, a Community Care poll has found.
This follows recent Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) data highlighting how rising poverty and homelessness are driving demand for children’s social care.
ADCS found that inadequate housing, welfare reforms and families lacking access to public funds were key factors behind increased safeguarding activity.
As of 2022-23, 4.3m – or 30% of – children were in relative poverty in the UK, meaning they lived in a household whose income was below 60% of the average after taking account of housing costs.
This is up from 27% of children in 2021-22 (source: Institute for Fiscal Studies).
Despite this, a Community Care poll of 468 readers found that 62% felt poverty was ‘not at all’ or ‘not very much’ taken into account in social care assessments and planning.
Only a quarter (25%) said it was ‘somewhat’ considered, and 13% believed it played a significant role.
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Do you consider the impact of poverty when conducting an assessment or drawing up a care plan?
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Sadly the priority is to complete assessments to a very tight timescale so poverty is overlooked in order to meet deadlines. Pressure from managers
No, the responsibility is with each social worker to complete a full assessment. Blaming managers for this won’t wash I’m afraid. How pressured is a social worker that they can’t ask basic questions about how people live and what financial resources they have to live? That’s a minimum requirement of this job. Social workers do financial assessment don’t they? Ask the real questions not the ones that get us of the hook in our own self justifications by blaming “pressures”, “lack of time” and “managers”. Good social work requires effort and tenacity. As somone once said, try doing your jobs.
Social workers are not the ones who complete financial assesments.
A high case load and lack of time DOES effect with you can do with people. That is not the social worker fault.
They do in adults services. We really shoukd be moving away from two tier social work. If we are a profession, and we aren’t, then all of us should be valued as social workers not just the genies who rescue children and valiantly safeguard families.
Amen to that
Well said I feel social care in this country is rotten to its core whole system needs an overhaul it is not fit for purpose I know great social care workers but I can honestly say I have met some of the worst self serving self promoting egos who couldn’t see the reality off poverty on a family some barely have contact just look down thier nose
No, pressures from managers is to complete assessments within tight timescales to comply with guidance, hence corners are cut and this may include a failure to address the important issue of poverty
If a social worker is content to submit a substandard assessment that’s on them. If a social worker knowingly submits a substandard assessment they can not claim to be an ethical social worker. It really isn’t something to hide behind the usual pressure from management mantra. Some might say doing this knowingly is somewhat dishonest too
In the age of endless service failures it’s novel to read the claim “to comply with guidance”.
As I recall framework for assessment would require impoverished situation and circumstances to be considered but we’re rarely accounted for In the situations families found themselves in or how poverty accounted for outcomes.
Local authorities and government policies were largely admonished for any responsibility in the creation of how families find themselves in how homelessness,employment and poverty create the misery beyond their control.create.
Blaming the parent is easy.
I don’t think this is about individual worker competence/care/compassion, or managerialism. This is about the futility of recognising and giving meaningful weight to poverty in children’s social work assessment. If poverty is acknowledged as a driving factor in a child’s needs not being met, what intervention is a statutory local authority social worker going to put in place to address it?
Inequality, and not acknowledging its significance and how it organises both how people live and how social workers assess, is baked into practice, because it is baked into every second of our lives. There is no real desire to address it at any level that might make a difference.
Used to be that social work teaching and social worker practice embedded social and political advocacy into practice. If “we can’t change anything” is the fatalism underpinning how social workers go about their business then there really isn’t any point in any intervention in anybodies life. Turn up, fill in a few forms and knock off feeling you’ve been a social worker is not my motivation. Your managers might give you short shrift but have conviction and pride that you’ve at least tried to highlight the impact of poverty on the people you work with. Perhaps it starts with change the social worker mind and purifying it from the endless despondency paralysing us. When I told some of my colleagues why I couldn’t join them for a shinding one Saturday as I was volunteering at the food bank they laughed. That diesnt make me virtuous it makes them a tad less ethical.
I’m dismayed at the tone of powerlessness adopted on this thread by those saying “my manager won’t let me”. When did this victimhood and perceived lack of personal agency gain currency in social work? When did personal integrity and professional pride and ethics get replaced by such pesimissim? I’m at a loss to understand and to be honest also ashamed to be associated with social work if this is the culture now. Shameful.
Contemporary social work managers increasingly have little front line experience. They are the (often ruthlessly) ambitious social workers who have scrambled for promotion and invested more time in themselves than supporting people – is there any surprises how they promote priorities and culture in teams?
It’s too easy to blame managers, believe me I work under one who struggles to make a cup of tea so not a fan of them by any means, but they reflect the priorities set by the likes of SWE ‘standards’ and supported by self serving lobbyist of BASW and the it’s ilk. We are all responsible for letting all this happen. While strategic managers were deciding the parameters of how we should be as social workers those who were supposed to be our advocates, PSWs, Practice Educators and so on, were prattling on about irrelevancies like CDP, undefined and Social Worker of the Year nonsense The new fad is AI and our supposed leaders are salivating about ‘new’ ways of working without understanding the implications beyond ‘quicker’ report turnarounds and keeping quite on the staff reductions they can’t wait to implement. So I don’t blame managers at all. They are doing what they are meant to do unapologetically. It’s time rather than hiding g behind them social workers did what they are trained to do too. One of which is knowing the impact of poverty on daily life. Keeping quite about the poverty you see on visits makes you more of a manager than a social worker.
Is my manager made me the contemporary version of I’m only obeying orders?
I was interested to read this article about poverty and its place in contemporary SW practice, and, especially the reactions from readers.
It’s struck me for some time that its significance in social work practice has progressively declined considerably over the years since I entered the profession in 1973. Logically, this is odd given how obvious it is when working on the “front line” that poverty and deprivation are relevant factors across almost the whole spectrum of problems embraced by our profession. Today’s SW’s should not need the welter of research evidence about the link between poverty and social problems to justify and so encourage them the take the issue into account in their work. As some respondents commented, a full and proper assessment cannot ignore the role played by poverty where it is present. Of course there will be instances where it is not a factor, but that should also be acknowledged for consistency of practice, to demonstrate this essential matter has been considered.
In my first post as a social worker in Manchester, the financial circumstances of the people we were helping was one of the first issues we were expected to prioritise in assessment. If people were not working their benefits position was carefully checked to make sure they were receiving all eligible benefits, work which included liaison with the benefits agency, and if necessary, support and representation at tribunals. An important part of this poverty alleviation activity also included approaching charities for additional help, which could be financial or material eg home necessities including for example domestic appliances. Easing financial problems, especially for families presenting for all kinds of help ( we were “Generic SW’s” in those days ), was often the key to beginning to restore people’s independence, and so improve lives. After all, put very simply, the purpose of social work is to help people to have better lives. At the time, the City of Manchester invested heavily in establishing an anti-poverty infrastructure consisting of what were known as “Welfare Rights Officers”, who were usually based in social services offices, giving the SW’s ready access to specialist advice and practical assistance to help them to be as effective as possible in tackling poverty. It worked very well, but sadly it has withered away.
In a culture of “personal truths” and social work practice portrayed as individual trauma and distress tying to alleviate material conditions of clients is seen as mechanistic and a tad irrelevant. Social work now is uniformed psychotherapy. Not many manage it well but most see it as their core function. We’ve gone from making sure homes are warm and have sufficient food to feeling affronted if we are asked to do benefits reviews and financial assessments. And that is the difference now between the training and the motivation of pre-degree social workers and the target led practice of the academic ‘professionals’ who laugh at people like me who qualified in 1983.
When I was doing my social work training in the late 1980s we talked about poverty and social class all the time. Nowadays, all many people seem to care about is identity politics. I am not saying that issues around ethnicity and sexuality are unimportant. They are very important, but they are not the only reason for why people end up in contact with social services.
If I were to say this in my place of work I know for certain that I would be accused of racism and homophobia/transphobia. So I don’t. Cowardly yes, self preservation also yes. I agree with all those contributors who point out that these days social work is a blancmange of psudo psychotherapy.
As social workers we need to have sensitivity to people’s needs in relation to culture, gender, sexuality etc in the care plans we make for them. However, we must also have an ability to identify and focus on the main elements of their presenting problems. Lack of material resources such as housing and money are likely to be a major issue in a large percentage of people we see as social workers. If this does not feature in assessments then there is something wrong.